Howtos and Tutorials

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that powerÂ FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit likeÂ web.py orÂ Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and usesÂ epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. We built the web server specifically to handle FriendFeed’s real-time features â€” every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers. (For more information on scaling servers to support thousands of clients.

See theÂ Tornado documentation for a detailed walkthrough of the framework.

Download and install

Prerequisites

Tornado has been tested on Python 2.5 and 2.6. To use all of the features of Tornado, you need to haveÂ PycURL and a JSON library likeÂ simplejson installed. Complete installation instructions for Mac OS X and Ubuntu are included below for convenience.